Aurélie de Jong wins the SwisstopoEDU award 2022!

Aurélie de Jong, who completed her Master thesis at ECEO in the fall semester 2021-2022, has studied temporal evolution of Swiss forests in Wallis. Using a time series between 1992 and 2017, she developed temporal neural networks to map the forest dynamic enforcing temporal consistency. To do so, she used Swisstopo aerial images and the SwissTLM3D forest layer. Her results showed that it is possible to backtrack the spatial expansion (or contraction) of forests with these precious sources of data at 1 meter resolution! This opens possibilities to backtrack the dynamics for an additional half century using the recently released historical data from Swisstopo.

The SwisstopoEDU award recognizes every year a Master student who works on issues of relevance for Swisstopo.

The work was co-supervised by Devis Tuia, Benjamin Kellenberger and Thien-Anh Nguyen from ECEO.